Reviews: Robinson, Kim Stanley

Aurora —
Kim Stanley Robinson

There’s
a sub-genre I call “premature interstellarism”, stories about
unfortunate explorers and colonists whose toolkits are, alas, not up
to the challenge of exploring or settling other planets. Given the
long history of failed colonization efforts on Earth, the planet on
which we actually evolved,
the idea that some colonization efforts would fail seems like a
no-brainer. 2015’s Aurora
is an example of such a book, standing next to such works as Poul
Anderson’s “The Alien Enemy,” Joanna Russ’ We
Who Are About To…, and
Brian Stableford’s Daedalus series.

It’s
a rare book that fits into just one possible sub-genre. There is a
far larger, more important sub-genre to which Aurora belongs and
that’s Books with Idiot Plots.

Trigger
warning for physicists and biologists: this is supposedly hard
SF,
which is to say SF
that provides enough technical detail that the reader can be certain
that various mechanisms and events couldn’t work the way the author
has them working.
Also, spoiler warning.